her, when Joe picked her up, was a convict’s leg-iron which had been filed asunder.
Knowing what I knew, I believed the iron to be my convict’s iron – the iron I had seen and heard him filing at, on the marshes – but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use.
It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon.
The Constables and the Bow Street men from London[72] were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.
Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her speech was unintelligible.[73]
Chapter 17
I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life. The most remarkable event was the arrival of my birthday and my paying another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty at the gate; I found Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke of Estella in the very same way, if not in the very same words. The interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was going, and told me to come again on my next birthday.
I tried to decline taking the guinea on the first occasion, but with no better effect than causing her to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took it.
The dull old house did not change, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass stood still. Daylight never entered the house. It bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.
Wopsle’s second cousin Biddy used to come to help me and Joe. Biddy was a kind and intelligent but poor young woman. She was not beautiful – she was common, and could not be like Estella – but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good. I liked to talk to her, and she usually listened to me with great attention.
“Biddy,” said I one day, “we must talk together. And I must consult you a little more. Let us have a quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”
Joe more than readily undertook the care of my sister on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out together. It was summer-time, and lovely weather. When we had passed the village and the church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes and began to see the sails of the ships as they sailed on, I resolved that it was a good time and place for the admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.
“Biddy,” said I, “I want to be a gentleman.”
“O, I wouldn’t, if I was you!” she returned. “What for?”
“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for wanting to be a gentleman.”
“You know best, Pip; but don’t you think you are happier as you are?”
“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life. Don’t be absurd.”
“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry for that; I didn’t mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be comfortable.”
“I could lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now. See how I am going on. Dissatisfied and uncomfortable, coarse and common!”
Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.
“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”
I answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account.[74]”
“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?[75]” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I admire her dreadfully.”
Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me. She put her hand upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair.
“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing, and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it. Shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”
“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”
“Till you’re a gentleman,” said Biddy.
“You know I never shall be, so that’s always.”
“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper. And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”
I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther. I said to myself, “Pip, what a fool you are!”
We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right.
“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “If I could only get myself to fall in love with you, that would be the thing for me.[76]”
“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.
Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and the plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that I was becoming a partner with Joe and Biddy.
Chapter 18
It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud. Of that group I was one.
I noticed a strange gentleman leaning over the back of the settle opposite me, looking on.
“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith among you, by name Joseph – or Joe – Gargery. Which is the man?”
“Here is the man,” said Joe.
The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.
“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip? Is he here?”
“I am here!” I cried.
The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss Havisham.
“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my communication here.”
Amidst a wondering silence, we three